stood as a
revolutionary fact.

IV.

Feuerbach proceeds from a religious self-alienation, the duplication of
the world into a religious, imaginary, and a real world. His work
consists in the discovery of the material foundations of the religious
world. He overlooked the fact that after carrying this to completion the
important matter still remains unaccomplished. The fact that the
material foundation annuls itself and establishes for itself a realm in
the clouds can only be explained from the heterogeneity and
self-contradiction of the material foundation. This itself must first
become understood in its contradictions and so become thoroughly
revolutionized by the elimination of the contradiction. After the
earthly family has been discovered as the secret of the Holy Family, one
must have theoretically criticised and theoretically revolutionised it
beforehand.

V.

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thought, invokes impressions
produced by the senses, but does not comprehend sensation as practical
sensory activities.

VI.

Feuerbach dissolves religion in humanity. But humanity is not an
abstraction dwelling in each individual. In its reality it is the
ensemble of the conditions of society.

Feuerbach, who does not enquire into this fact, is therefore compelled:

1. To abstract religious sentiment from the course of history, to place
it by itself, and to pre-suppose an abstract, isolated, human
individual.

2. Humanity is therefore only comprehended by him as a species, as a
hidden sort of merely natural identity of qualities in which many
individuals are embraced.

VII.

Therefore Feuerbach does not see that religious feeling is itself a
product of society, and that the abstract individual which he analyses
belongs in reality to a certain form of society.

VIII.

The life of society is essentially practical. All the mysteries which
seduce speculative thought into mysticism find their solution in human
practice and in concepts of this practice.

IX.

The highest point to which materialism attains, that is the materialism
which comprehends sensation, not as a practical fact, is the point of
view of the single individual in bourgeois society.

X.

The standpoint of the old materialism is "bourgeois" society; the
standpoint of the new, human society, or associated humanity.

XI.

Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, but the point
is to change it.